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Antenna Software buying specialist in mobile apps for finance, SharePoint users

Antenna Software, which offers products and services for building, rolling out and managing mobile applications, Thursday is announcing it has acquired a Boston-based company with expertise in financial and Microsoft SharePoint applications. Terms of the buyout of Vaultus Mobile Technologies, a 10-year-old company with roots at MIT, were not disclosed. Antenna has about 225 employees and Vaultus adds fewer than 50 people to that number. 2010′s top tech M&A deals The deal will enable Antenna to expand beyond its expertise in business-to-business-to-employee mobile apps to business-to-business-to-customer apps, says Jim Hemmer, Antenna’s CEO (the extra “business” in those terms refers to Antenna supplying technology to businesses, which in term provide apps to employees or customers). Among those apps are programs targeted at financial services companies’ customers, including those focused on mobile commerce. “Mobile commerce is the next significant wave of our technology expansion and I think, the market’s expansion,” Hemmer says. “There’s this affinity people have with their smartphone that’s a new phenomenon.” Vaultus also brings Antenna technology for business intelligence applications, such as those used for management dashboards and that can tap into software from companies like Cognos or SAP/Business Objects. In addition, Vaultus offers what Hemmer describes as a strong application for mobile access to Microsoft SharePoint. “SharePoint has huge penetration in the market right now, though I would suggest there’s an opportunity to improve the user experience,” he says. “With me I can never find the things I want, so if you can make it easier to find the stuff I think that will make it more impactful.” Unlike with Antenna’s acquisition last year of fellow mobile middleware vendor Dexterra, which involved melding the companies and their platforms, Antenna is not planning to integrate the Vaultus technology with its own in the short term, says Jim Somers, chief marketing and strategy officer at Antenna. Vaultus will operate as a subsidiary and take advantage of channel and other opportunities to work with Antenna, he says.

Teardown: iPad cost $260 to make

Judge in Sarah Palin e-mail hacking case denies motion challenging computer search

FBI agents did not violate alleged hacker David Kernell’s Fourth Amendment rights when they searched through the entire contents of his computer in connection with their investigation, a federal magistrate judge ruled this week in the Sarah Palin e-mail hacking case . In a 41-page ruling this week, Judge Clifford Shirley in Knoxville denied Kernell’s motions to quash the information gathered from those searches and said that no unreasonable search or seizure had taken place, as Kernell had claimed. In throwing out Kernell’s motion to quash, Judge Shirley noted that numerous courts have previously ruled it unnecessary for warrants authorizing the search of a computer, to have language specifying how the search should be conducted. “Contrary to Defendant’s argument, [the executing officer] seized all of the computer equipment, not each individual file,” the judge noted. “This was proper because all of the computer equipment and storage devices were within the scope of the search warrant.” The agent conducting the search acted reasonably and “his examination of each file on Defendant’s computers and storage media was reasonable and necessary,” the judge said. Kernell, 22, is alleged to have broken into then Governor Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account in Sept. 2008, when she was Sen. John McCain’s running mate in the presidential elections. He is then alleged to have publicly posted screen shots of several messages from her account. Kernell was initially charged in October 2008, with a single county of felony unauthorized access of a computer. In Feb 2009, Kernell was charged with identity theft, wire fraud, computer fraud and anticipatory obstruction of justice in a four-count superseding indictment. Kernell, a University of Tennessee-Knoxville student at the time of the incident, is the son of a Democratic state legislator from Memphis . After his indictment, Kernell has filed several motions challenging various aspects of the case against him. In his motion to suppress the information gathered from the computer searches, Kernell claimed that the government agents had exceeded the scope of the warrant by searching the entire contents of the computer. He claimed that the searches of his computer were in violation of Fourth Amendment protections and a particular provision in the Federal Rules of Criminal procedure. Kernell argued that agents should have carried out a “particularized search” for the specific information they were looking for, rather than the broad search that was conducted. The government for its part responded by claiming that the seizure and search of Kernell’s laptop was constitutional. They argued that Fourth Amendment protections do not require search warrants to specify the precise manner in which searches should be carried out. Judge Shirley’s ruling on the matter is the latest pre-trial setback for Kernell. Last week, the judge denied another motion by Kernell seeking to quash a search warrant for ISP records from Yahoo, which is based in California. Kernell had challenged the authority of a court in Tennessee to issue a search warrant for an entity based in California. Prior to that ruling, the judge had issued another ruling which basically allows the government obstruction of justice charge against Kernell to stand. Kernell is currently out on bond. His trial is scheduled to begin later this month.

Google faces tough battle to win AdMob

1-in-10 Windows PCs still vulnerable to Conficker worm

More than a year after doomsday reports hinted that the Conficker worm would bring down the Internet, one-in-10 Windows PCs still have not been patched to plug the hole the worm wriggles through, new data shows. And 25 of every 1,000 systems are currently infected with the worm. According to Qualys, a security risk and compliance management provider, about 10% of the hundreds of thousands of Windows systems it monitors for customers have not yet applied Microsoft ‘s MS08-067 security update. MS08-067, an out-of-band release that shipped in October 2008, patched a bug in the service Windows uses to connect to file and print servers. Just 11 days after Microsoft delivered the emergency update, antivirus vendors said a worm, variously tagged as Conficker and Downadup, was using the Windows vulnerability , as well as other methods, to aggressively attack PCs and build a massive botnet. By January 2009, some security firms estimated that Conficker had compromised millions of PCs . Concern about Conficker reached a crescendo as mainstream media, including CBS’ 60 Minutes television program, reported that the worm was set to update itself on April 1, 2009. Because of the size of the Conficker botnet — estimates ran as high as 12 million by that point — and the then-unknown next move by the hijacked PCs, hype ran at fever pitch. Some speculated that the huge botnet would go on a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) rampage, crippling large swaths of the Internet. In the end, Conficker’s April 1 update passed quietly. But its botnet — anywhere between four and seven millions machines — is still intact, and by Qualys’ reckoning, significant numbers of PCs are still be vulnerable to attack. Qualys regularly measures what it calls “persistence,” the percentage of machines that are never patched against a specific vulnerability. According to Qualys’ data, the percentage of unpatched PCs typically stabilizes at between 5% and 10%, with an average around 7%-8%. Nearly a year-and-a-half after Microsoft delivered MS08-067, the update’s persistence is at the 10% mark, the high side of the usual range, said Wolfgang Kandek, Qualys’ chief technology officer. That shouldn’t come as a shock. In December 2008, Kandek said users weren’t in any hurry to deploy the MS08-067 patch. In fact, they weren’t applying it any faster than the usual fixes Microsoft issued, even though it was an emergency update. Although Conficker may be a forgotten memory for most, the botnet’s not dead, experts have said. On last week’s one-year anniversary of the April 1 doomsday deadline, officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the agency was preparing a report on the global struggle to keep Conficker at bay. Dubbed the Conficker Working Group, the collection of security experts and Internet domain authorities tried to cripple the worm by blocking it from updating its botnet. “In terms of learning, it’s been a great success,” Rodney Joffe, a member of the group, told the IDG News Service’s Bob McMillan last week. “In terms of defeating Conficker, it’s gotten us nowhere.” Qualys’ data backs that up: About 2.5% of the PCs that the company scanned are infected with the Conficker worm.

Server industry set to rebound

Microsoft previews Exchange 2010 SP1

In a blog entry posted Wednesday, Microsoft offered a glimpse of what will be in the first major update of Exchange Server 2010, due later this year. Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) will bring a range of new features and capabilities to the back office mail server software, including improvements to the software’s archiving functionality and to its Web client, according to the blog entry posted by Exchange developer Michael Atalla. The update will allow users to set up an archive folder that could be located in a mailbox separate from the primary mailbox, which could better help administrators keep their main e-mail databases at manageable sizes. The browser client, called Outlook Web Access (OWA), will get some significant new features with this release as well. The client may seem faster to end-users, thanks to its ability to “pre-fetch” messages and run multiple operations simultaneously, according to the blog post. The OWA user interface has been reordered for greater readability as well. And, for the first time, OWA users can read and compose messages protected by Microsoft’s information rights management (IRM) technology, a feature previously available only in the regular Outlook client. The release will also bring enhancements in the administrative interfaces and searching capabilities. It will also roll up all the features and bug fixes since the first release of Exchange 2010. A beta of SP1 will be made available in June, during the company’s TechEd conference.

AOL to shut or sell Bebo

FASTTAKES: NTT DoCoMo, DiGi, BSNL, StarHub, Chunghwa, NTT Com

Police May Get GSM Caller Location Identification System

The police are now in the final phase of acquisition of the technology, known as a GSM Caller Location Identification System. As the name implies, it will allow the authorities to trace which location a cellphone call is being made from. This will be key in investigating several different types of crimes, but will be particularly useful in kidnapping for ransom cases. The question of whether or not the police have the authority to use such equipment, however, remains unanswered. Under the existing arrangements, only intelligence agencies can use, or offer the use of, such technology. “The police are not allowed to have such a system or technology,” admitted a senior police official who wished not to be named. “We are going through with our plans to acquire the system but we would definitely only use it when it’s mandated to us. Acquisition of such modern and sensitive systems takes time.” The sources at the Central Police Office (CPO) said that several companies with expertise in the area have shown an interest in helping the police acquire the system, and have already appeared before officials to explain the features of their services. It should be noted that the police have already been turned down when they requested authorisation to have access to cellular phone subscribers’ data, including records of calls and SMSs, through cellphone service providers. The intelligence agencies, however, have this authorisation, and the police must turn to them when they require it. “Under the existing arrangements, for investigations of any case, we need to seek help from the intelligence agencies, mostly through the Citizen-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC),” said a senior police investigation officer. “If we need data of any cellular connection or personal data of the subscriber, the mobile phone companies don’t entertain our request directly. A set procedure is followed and that’s the SOP [Standard Operating Procedure].” Though there is no word from the police authorities to justify the move without a go-ahead from their high-ups and security hierarchy, experts involved in handling criminal cases in close coordination with the investigators see the technology as the need of the hour for effective policing.“We support such a move made by the police,” said Ahmed Chinoy, the chief of the CPLC. “The growing use of technology by criminals demands the same facility for police to counter their designs and major acts of crime. The police around the world are privileged to use such technology. So why not in Pakistan, where we face multi-dimensional security threats along with regular crimes?” He said the existing arrangements did not suit the investigators, which took time and needed to engage several institutions to get even a single piece of information. The caller location tracking technology was badly needed, he added, in investigation of almost every kidnapping for ransom case. “Most of the time, we need to move faster for the security of a kidnap victim’s life, as well as the arrest of the kidnappers,” said Mr Chinoy. “But under the current SOP, the police need to follow certain rules and procedure, which takes times and puts everything, including the life of the victim, at risk.” To assure proper and legitimate use of the system, the CPLC chief said, a mechanism could be designed that kept a check on the police, denying the opportunity for the misuse of the technology by law enforcers. “The issue of misuse can be handled through certain arrangements and we can play our role in this regard if required. But one can’t deny the police such a technology or system, which is badly needed, only on these grounds,” he concluded.